Abandoned babies found decomposing in Gaza hospital weeks after it was evacuated

NBC NEWS

The cease-fire is over, but not before it offered a glimpse of the war’s horrors to Palestinians in Gaza and people around the world.

As residents used the fragile truce to find aid, search for loved ones under the rubble, and head home to survey the destruction, a particularly disturbing scene emerged.

Seen in a video that moves through the abandoned and disarrayed hallways of the pediatric intensive care unit at Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in northern Gaza were several babies whose unattended bodies lay on separate hospital beds. A blurred version of the video was shared widely on social media this week, a grim and graphic contrast to other scenes of families reunited as hostages and prisoners were freed.

In a piece he reported, Mohammed Baalousha, a journalist with the Emirati TV channel Al-Mashhad, said he found the decomposing infants when he entered the pediatric ICU in the health facility in Gaza City. The hospital’s staff and critically ill patients were forced to evacuate in early November as the Israeli military focused its ground assault on the city, with hospitals under fire.

NBC News obtained raw footage from the channel and has reviewed its contents.

Truce between Israel and Hamas ends

“You will see now horrific scenes of this hospital,” Baalousha narrates in the unedited footage, after passing through the corridor marked with a sign reading “Intensive Care Unit” in Arabic.

‘We had to leave patients on the beds’

Filmed about two weeks after the hospital was evacuated, the footage appears to show at least three of the five dead infants, with their bodies putrefying, in close proximity to catheters and ventilators.

One baby is seen decomposing while lying alone, appearing to still be connected to an oximeter with a green oxygen tank nearby, as insects appear to crawl on its chest. A bedsheet is used as a soft pillow, and an empty bottle and a medical glove box are shown closer to the bed’s edge.

NBC News cannot independently confirm the status of the infants in Al-Nasr’s pediatric ICU between the time hospital staff evacuated and the point when the journalist accessed the unit.

Two independent forensic pathologists reviewed the raw footage. They said the advanced stages of decomposition of the dead infants is consistent with the roughly two weeks from the time the infants would have been abandoned to the date the video was shot.

Around Nov. 10, doctors, patients and hospital staff were forced to evacuate Al-Nasr as the Israeli military continued its ground invasion of northern Gaza and issued repeated evacuation calls to the hospital and others in the vicinity. Amid heavy gunfire and shelling, and as Israeli tanks encircled the hospital, staff concluded they could not safely evacuate five babies, several of whom were premature and “placed on oxygen machines,” said Dr. Mustafa Al-Kahlot, director of the hospital.

“Our evacuation from Al-Nasr Hospital was very difficult and under fire,” he told NBC News in a phone call on Wednesday. “Children cannot be carried by hand or evacuated without oxygen equipment.”

An earlier video taken during that evacuation period, which was obtained and verified by NBC News, shows Al-Kahlot in the same hospital room pleading for help from global organizations to evacuate eight patients in the pediatric ICU. One baby is seen being cared for in a bed next to him, with monitors beeping in the background, as he describes bombing and shelling on the hospital. He also confirms the death of a child due to “the lack of oxygen.”